Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Happy World Giraffe Day and National Selfie Day! In honor of these two holidays and the Illustration Friday prompt for this week (yarn), I drew a picture of myself imagining a few characters, including a giraffe and a bird knitting a looooooong scarf with yarn:

Did you take a selfie today or draw a picture of yourself? Did you celebrate World Giraffe Day?

In other news, I finally re-designed my website. WooHoo! Unfortunately, it is not as mobile friendly as I thought it would be. Boo! I thought that the fluid design I was creating was also a responsive* design, but it was not. (*Responsive designs detect the device you're using and automatically reformat the website without the user having to do anything.)

I still like the new design, whether it's responsive or not! That said:

Will be re-designing my website again, just as soon as I learn how to make it a responsive design. Hoping to do it this fall or winter - if all else fails, I could make a Wordpress site (though I haven't had luck with WP security and getting hacked in the past, so I'm hoping to figure out how to make a responsive site myself instead).

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

The first thing I thought of when I found out the Illustration Friday prompt this week was nose, is, "Follow your nose! It always knows!" If you know your classic cereal characters and commercials, you know that's what Toucan Sam said about finding Froot Loops (click here to see the evolution of the character and to see the old commercials starring Toucan Sam).

I liked Toucan Sam, but the thing that always bothered me about those commercials is that the thing they were calling a nose wasn't a nose at all! It was the toucan's beak. Still liked the commercials though, especially the spooky haunted house/knight one (see link above to watch).

Did you like Toucan Sam? Did you like the other cereal mascots? What was your favorite cereal character or commercial? Mine might be Count Chocula, because chocolate + monster = awesome! (Though I like several of other cereal characters too).

After all the thoughts about cereal and toucans, I painted this image for Illustration Friday this week:

FYI, beaks are still NOT noses in this image. My characters are wearing the beaks ON their noses. Though technically robots don't have noses, so that just applies to the girl ... or at least my robot doesn't have a nose! The girl and the robot are from a current picture book project. The toucans are just for this picture.

While waiting for the paint to dry, I ran across my painting of Little Red Riding Hood from last year. Lots of big noses in this painting! Since I never shared it, I decided to share it for Illustration Friday this week (also because the toucan beak covered up the girl's nose in the other image):

Can't decide if the woman Little Red is talking to is her mother, her grandmother, or the huntsman (huntswoman?). I'm also wondering if Little Red made up the whole story about the wolf eating grandma. Maybe she's a teller of tall tales (looks like her nose is growing from fibs, just like Pinocchio's nose did). No matter what, I think this version of the story is a bit different than the one we knew as kids. (Maybe I should write it. Hmm.)

I had two main goals while painting this. 1. Have fun. I did! 2. Make the wolf scary. My wolves tend not to be scary, but I think I pulled it off this time. Here's a close up of the wolf. Do you think the wolf is scary? -

Do you follow your nose to breakfast every morning? Do you still eat cereal for breakfast (if you did as a kid)? Do you just wish you could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat cereal again?

Author/illustrator Stephanie Ruble has been making art ever since she could hold a crayon, and making up stories since she learned to talk. She's currently working on new picture books, images for her portfolio, and drawing art for unusual holidays. Thanks for visiting!
Picture Book: Ewe and Aye written by Candace Ryan, Illustrated by Stephanie Ruble - in bookstores now.